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the story below came up today in both yahoo news and time.com. when one reads it, it is clear that the particular problem plagues both pentecostalism as well as all of christianity. it is just that those from pentecostalism are more well-known high flyers and hence attract more attention when they fall.

yet, everyone falls, make no mistake about it. no one is spared. in fact, the higher one climbs up the ladder of success, the harder is the fall! the stories reminds one of samson, a judge in the OT times, full of raw 'charismatic' power but when unbridled and unchecked, it led him to his downfall.

the stories lead us to ask the question of whether we will genuinely learn from our mistakes or go about claiming a sort of fuzzy repentance because there is 'grace after grace after grace'!

on tuesday morning chapel, stm lecturers take turns to share a short 5 minutes devotion in the seminary. this is followed by the celebration of the holy communion and announcements for the whole community. because of the limited length of time (everything squeezed into 1 hour), preachers have to be very concise (unfortunately, many of my colleagues find it extremely difficult to preach a 5 mins devotion. for me, it is not a problem since biblical scholars learn by training to be concise and precise in what they say and write!).

so, i shared from Psalm 56:8 on the topic of tears. Tears? if you know the stm community intimately, many tears would have been shed by now by the students because of the countless assignments, class presentations, quizzes, datelines etc. if there was an appropriate topic for the second half of the semester, it would be this.

‘Thou has kept count of my tossings; put thou my tears in thy bottle! Are they not in thy book?’ (Psalm 5…

Richard Harvey is a Messianic Jew and in his book, Luther and the Jews, he takes it to heart to reconsider the legacy of Martin Luther in relation to the Jews today. Many Christians would remember that Luther wrote many pieces of polemic writings against the Jews which sparked a violent revolt and led to many deaths in Luther’s time. The biggest question Christians and Jews struggle about Luther is that he, who wrote about the three solas, on justification by faith, and the triumph of God’s grace, can express such deep hostility against the Jews of his day. In the book’s Introduction, Richard explains what would be a personal quest as…